Is AI the missing link in creating personalized marketing experiences?

In this episode, Lara Belonogoff, Senior Director of Brand Management at SurveyMonkey, discusses the synergy between AI and marketing through the "ask, listen, act" protocol. This transformative approach emphasizes understanding stakeholders, meticulous idea vetting, and data-driven strategies. Lara exemplifies SurveyMonkey's AI-powered insights, showcasing the balance between AI and human sensibilities for effective decision-making. The conversation underscores the significance of informed choices driven by data and empathetic customer understanding. Lara's insights into the success of the "ask, listen, act" campaign highlight AI's potential to enhance a culture of responsiveness, offering a concise yet panoramic view of AI's pivotal role in research and its integration with human attention.

You can reach out to Lara on LinkedIn.

Many thanks to Lara for being our guest. Thanks also to our producer, Natalie Pusch; our editor, James Carlisle; and this episode's sponsor, SurveyMonkey.

This episode is brought to you by our friends at SurveyMonkey. Have questions about your business? Just ask. SurveyMonkey’s AI-powered platform answers more than 20 million questions every day, delivering insights that can have a big impact on your marketing decisions. Sign up for free and explore survey templates at surveymonkey.com/ask.

Hello, everybody, it’s Lenny Murphy with another edition of the GreenBook Podcast. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to spend it with myself and my guest. And it seems like often we have people that I know. Today we don’t have somebody that I know, so this is going to be a great conversation for both of us, as I get to know Lara Belonogoff from SurveyMonkey, the Senior Director of Brand Strategy. Welcome, Lara.

Thank you for having me, Lenny.

It’s great to have you here. And there was a whole conversation beforehand about not butchering the last name. I think I was okay.

Yeah. No—

[laugh]. You know, as our oldest daughter, we named her Eirin and we did this funky spelling of E-I-R-I-N, this kind of Gaelic thing, and we learned really quickly don’t make it complicated because it’s just really tough in school, for the kids and for everybody else. Like, “How do you pronounce that?” So, anyway [laugh], I get it. Well, welcome. Glad that you’re here. And there’s a lot for us to cover, so—and since I’m not that familiar with you—obviously familiar with SurveyMonkey—why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at SurveyMonkey?

Sure thing. So, I lead brand strategy and management here at SurveyMonkey. And I oversee our research team, our content strategy team, our content marketing team, organic, social, and video. So, I basically have my hands in a lot of different functional areas. And then I’m lucky enough to have a really great colleague who I work with very closely who oversees our design for brand. And so, between the two of us, we sort of run our brand team.

So, you just—it’s very small jobs.

[laugh]. Uh, not really [laugh]. Um—

Well, especially in such a dynamic company in a dynamic industry with lots of shifts over the last few years. So, how long have you been with the company?

I’ve actually been here for seven years. And previous to that, I had actually done a very short stint as a contractor and left, and then kind of came back for a large project. And then I haven’t left. My role has changed and things—and the company has changed. We’ve recently announced that we’re returning to our iconic SurveyMonkey brand.

Yeah, wow, especially for seven years. So, you’ve been there through all of it the exciting times over the last few years, right, the growth, and yeah. That’s all types of good stuff. Cool. And for what it’s worth, I have always been a big fan of the company.

Yeah. Well so, you know, when you talk about kind of like that idea of, like, this DIY research company that’s 20-plus years old and maybe was, like, people didn’t realize what it was up to and what was capable of, I think, like, that idea of democratizing data and, like, getting it into the hands of more people always appealed to me, but I think I only understood it philosophically when I first joined the company. I’m like, “Oh, that sounds like something I could align myself to.” But once I actually had my hot little hands on that platform and I was able to use it to make, like, a case for, like, “Oh, here’s how you can test a hypothesis. Here’s how you can, like, solve an open issue. Here’s how you can perform discovery on creative.”

Yeah, it brings up a good point, but just to divert from it, I don’t think people recognize how robust and high-quality your audience is. Or even that you have your own audience. I’m also a political junkie, and, you know, watching as SurveyMonkey has played in the polling arena, and consistently, you were better than just about anybody else. So.

Yeah, our audience—

Yeah, yeah. So audience, the days of dismissing, you know, SurveyMonkey DIY ended a very long time ago, and I encourage everybody, if you’re looking for a new potential partner, you’re right up there with everybody else. So, is a high-quality solution, so—which kind of dovetails into, I’m sure, some of the reasons for the brand shift or whatever, but the, you know—hey, it’s been—I think you’re incredibly blessed and have been so instrumental in shifting the industry in so many ways. So anyway, all right, I’ll quit gushing like a fanboy. Because all that’s due to you, right [laugh], so.

Yeah. No, I love talking about this campaign. So, [laugh] back in, like, 2022, we set out to sort of reinvigorate our SurveyMonkey brand, and in that, we ended up developing this ‘Ask, Listen, Act’ campaign. I suppose ‘Ask, Listen, Act’ was basically a campaign line and a plainspoken way for us to tell a broader audience about what we could offer them as a brand and platform. Initially, we were kind of using the campaign to reach a broader audience, so a lot of people are, like, “Oh, I know SurveyMonkey from, like, my college days,” or it was it—like, this interaction or that interaction, but it’s not necessarily that they’re like, oh, yeah, that’s a business platform that I interact with on a daily basis.

Well, that speaks right to your DNA, right? The democratizing information and access to information. That’s fantastic. And when you have Gus Fring, representing you, right, that’s—[laugh] that adds a little more imprimatur of, “Well, yeah, I better pay attention.” So [laugh].

Yeah. I mean, he was great at kind of capturing attention. And there was actually one point in—where I was supposed to—I was capturing some behind-the-scenes footage and I got to interview him. And I thought, “Oh, this is really cool.” This is one of those career moments that you remember, you know? I got to ask him the tough questions [laugh].

Okay [laugh]. So, you were breaking bad [crosstalk 00:13:04]?

Yeah—I—yeah, breaking badly, maybe.

[laugh]. I’ll stop. I could take that in so many different ways, you know, kind of geeky direction. We all go there. But that’s really, really cool. I can’t think of another research company in the world that has done a campaign like that. I don’t think anybody has ever done that. So, that’s pretty amazing.

I mean, I think there have been other companies that have—like, feedback management companies that have done campaigns that might have been of that same ilk of the importance of feedback, but I think that idea of, like, disrupt the status quo, and, like, you can—you are part of this, like, you whether you’re a single, like, individual who just wants to make a change, you’re part of a team, or you’re an enterprise, like, it doesn’t matter. Our platform works for multiple different types of variations of groups. It’s not just hey, you have to have an enterprise account in order to work with us. Or you have to be, you know, just like an IC somewhere and there is no, like, team capability. So, I think that ability to stretch across from, like, whether you’re just one person who wants to make a change, a small group of people wants to make a change, or, like, you want to make an organizational change, we can help you do that. And I think maybe that’s a little bit of the secret sauce that we can offer that’s different from I think what our competitors are doing in the market.

Yeah. I would say so. Alright, so cool campaign. Now, like all campaigns, how’d it do?

Oh, yeah. That’s usually what they ask the minute after you say that it went live. Um, so [laugh].

[laugh]. What’s the attribution? How the—[laugh].

[crosstalk 00:14:58] deliver results, I guess, is the more businesslike way of describing that. So, let me talk about some of the bigger wins. So, when we started this campaign, we didn’t really have a TikTok presence to speak of. And so, after the first campaign wave, we actually—I mentioned we would work with influencers—we had 8.7 million views on TikTok for our#surveymonkey hashtag.

I’m trying to think of comparable campaigns in our category and there’s just nothing. I think what’s really interesting is that—so [laugh] let me back up. My default position is that research companies suck at marketing, right? Generally, as a rule, research companies, we may be really great at telling other people how to market effectively; generally, we are terrible at it. And you’re an examp—you’re the exception to that rule of, like, wait a minute, let’s take some real medicine here and do this right—because we have the tools, right—and deploy it and get measurable business impact. I think that’s a great story.

Yeah. I would say, I guess, to the point of people in this industry not being great at marketing, I would say there’s pockets of inspo that—

Yes. Yes. There are. And thank you for correcting me. There are some companies that I think are really, really great, have done—there are a few—that have done great marketing. But—

Yeah. And sometimes they’re just, like, a great campaign where you’re, like, “Oh, I’m a little green on the edges watching this. I wish I had done that.” And then yeah, I think you can kind of find inspiration anywhere, right? So—but agreed.

We’re going to take a quick pause to highlight our podcast partner, SurveyMonkey. Have questions about your target audience, the market, or your competition? 95% of the Fortune 500 and more than 300,000 organizations worldwide rely on SurveyMonkey online surveys and forums to answer their questions. That’s more than 20 million questions every day. Leading brands such as Allbirds, Golden State Warriors, and Chime all trust AI-powered insights from the SurveyMonkey platform to make decisions quickly and confidently. It’s easy to get started. Explore survey templates and sign up for free at surveymonkey.com/ask.

So, yeah I’m just sitting here as you’re talking, and thinking that the campaign of ‘Ask, Listen, Act,’ you’ve really just kind of described the entire [laugh] thinking on why that’s important and you’ve condensed it down into those three things. Let’s talk about that a little bit more, though, for folks who maybe didn’t connect the dots and the thinking that I did. The steps in that protocol, how can marketers apply it to achieve success in their campaigns, right? So, share a little bit of wisdom on what brought you to know here are the three key components and here’s what you need to do.

Okay. Yeah, so the stats that I was kind of just sharing, you know, those were from a project that was us delving into marketing from PMMs, brand, digital e-commerce folks, even into insights and research professionals. Like, we wanted to find out, like, what was the same and what was different, what sort of struggles they were having. And after kind of listening and looking through that data, we found that the thrash for most of them was that the last few years have just been really tough for a lot of us. And the connections we ended up making was that we’re in this sort of uncertain world and a lot of people were just craving a simple way to make the best, right next step.

The squeaky wheel gets the oil, right?

Yeah, there’s, like, these, like, sleeper areas that sometimes people don’t think about. And it’s like how—you need to make sure that when you ask, you as everybody in the sphere that you need to be thinking inside of, right? And when I say—the other part of ask is—there’s a part two to it, which not everybody is able to do. But if you can, being able to sort of pressure-test your ideas before you build them into programs. I gave that example, kind of at the top that, like, I didn’t get, like, how great concept testing [laugh] was until I was able to kind of bring in that data.

Yeah, I love that. I’ve always saw the marketing lifecycle, as, “Engage, understand, and activate.” It’s kind of the three, you know, the pieces, and that the insights function, obviously would fit under kind of the understand component. But I love how you’ve expanded that out, right, to create that connective tissue from a framework standpoint of, you know, it’s not just that understand has lots of different components, asking and listening, and there’s lots of data sources that exist to do that. It’s not always a survey or focus group, right? But the essence is in that activation component. We don’t ask and listen just so we can check off a box.

Yeah. I think the worst thing you can do is ask people their opinion and then show no interest in using that as another data point. Like, [laugh] if you do it to your team, it’s demoralizing. If you do it to your customers—like, “How could we improve our experience?” And obviously, anytime you do feedback, you’re going to sometimes, you know—you’ll have a somebody on your team who is like, “You know what I think would be great? A four-day workweek.” I’m like, “Me, too. Not happening.” Right [laugh]? [crosstalk 00:33:02]—

Right. [laugh]. Thanks for sharing, but—yeah.

—you’re like, “This feedback is not actionable at this time.” But you can dig into those things and say, what is it about a four-day workweek, and then end up finding out, like, oh, it’s actually like a flexibility thing that, you in fact, are most interested in. And I’d say like, you know, that’s, like, a tiny example. But those same mechanisms are at play in your customer feedback. So, they might complain and ask for something that your business isn’t ready to provide yet, but it doesn’t mean that the step to get them closer to something that they want isn’t available to you.

Yep. Yeah. And, you know, there’s a concept we’ve been playing with a lot recently, since the advent of AI, okay. We’ve gone all… all interview without saying it; now, we said it. Okay. From the standpoint of, you know, kind of always envisioned this idea of the always-on data machine at the enterprise level, right, and with all these different feeds, and that was the promise of big data, all that good stuff.

So, there’s a bunch of questions in those questions, so [crosstalk 00:34:42]—

It’s very cool. No, you did a good job of unpacking my quadruple-barreled question. So, [laugh]. I want to be conscious of your time as well as of our audience. So, you set the bar really high with the work that you’ve done in this campaign, with all of the success of SurveyMonkey, so what’s next? What’s on the horizon?

Well, in an effort to sort of drink my own champagne, I would say we’re going to continue to ask, listen, and act on what we’re hearing. Again, we are working on some of that AI research and how it’s affecting CX pros and marketers and others, so we’re very excited for, not just being, like, just, you know, being a part of that conversation and then also seeing, like, how it plays out. And I would say that we are just also deepening the ‘Ask, Listen, Act’ campaign as we roll it out to specific audiences or take lower in the funnel. And it seems to be a very rich creative vein where, just like a great jazz band, we have a riff and then we’re hearing sort of, you know, new versions of it getting played by different people. And like, working with influencers has just been amazing to kind of have another sort of creative influence coming in to say, like, “Here’s another thing you should just ask about.” So, that’s [audio break 00:41:29] [laugh].

Very cool. Well, and you know, if you work with Mr. Fring again, let him know that he’s got a fan in Kentucky.

I will [crosstalk 00:41:40], Lenny. Thank you so much for having me today. This was really, really pleasant and I really enjoyed our time together.

I don’t think anybody’s ever said pleasant, has ever said—

Oh, you can find me on LinkedIn. The last name is not common, so it’s pretty easy to find. And I would say that’s the easiest way to find me.

I appreciate it so much. Thank you. Quick shout out to our producer, Natalie. She’s always lurking in the background. Thanks for doing that. To our editor, James. Oop—and to our sponsor.